T-Mobile CEO: iPhone to remain exclusive in Germany

Germany may be one of the countries that won't be welcoming multiple iPhone …

With all this news floating around about multiple iPhone carriers in Australia, India, and Italy, many have just assumed that the exclusive carrier model is dead in the water. Viva the newly freed iPhone, amirite? Not so, according to T-Mobile CEO Hamid Akhavan, speaking in Paris this morning. He expects the iPhone to remain exclusive to T-Mobile in Germany, even after a next-gen iPhone release.

"We have a very good relationship with Apple...at least in Germany it is exclusive, and we expect it to remain as such," Akhavan told Reuters during the Reuters Technology, Media, and Telecoms Summit. "If and when there is a 3G iPhone we expect to have it exclusively in Germany as well."

Of course, T-Mobile's expectations may not match up entirely with reality. What with all these other countries getting multiple carriers, who knows what could happen in Germany—especially since the current iPhone is selling relatively slowly there. Then again, no one (on the outside, anyway) is entirely privy to the deals made between Apple and the cell carriers, so perhaps Apple has a stronger (and longer) agreement with T-Mobile than it does with the others. The same could be true with AT&T in the US. With only a couple more weeks before the expected 3G iPhone launch at WWDC (allegedly confirmed this morning by anonymous sources to Gizmodo), the countdown has begun to see which of these tidbits come true.